(Charles McNulty’s article appeared in the Los Angeles Times, 3/10/ 2025. Photo: Playwright Athol Fugard in 1996; Photo: (Keith Beaty / Toronto Star via Getty Images.)
W.H. Auden, meditating on the role of the artist in a poem by W.B. Yeats, concluded that poetry “makes nothing happen.” While generally true, the precept doesn’t hold in the case of playwright Athol Fugard, whose body of work helped transform the history of his nation.
Born in Middelburg, South Africa, in 1932 to an immigrant English father of Irish descent and a mother from an Afrikaner family, Fugard lived through the rise and fall of apartheid. His career brought an international spotlight to this system of racial segregation in plays that afflicted consciences and fomented activism at home and abroad.
Fugard, who died Saturday at age 92, was part of a resistance movement in South Africa that found its voice in the theater.
The stage became one of the few places where the flames of dissent, militantly stomped out in other quarters of society, grew to a conflagration seen around the world.
Athol Fugard, South African theater artist whose works confronted apartheid, dies at 92
March 10, 2025
“At the height of the apartheid era, the Market Theatre in Johannesburg and the Space Theatre in Cape Town, both defiantly nonracial venues in a racially divided country, produced shattering plays about black life under the apartheid regime,” recalled playwright and director Emily Mann in a Times article reflecting on Nelson Mandela’s legacy to the arts. Fugard, who was on the front lines of this activity, later acknowledged that, in the South African case, the pen was indeed mightier than the sword.
Citizenship had supplied Fugard with his mission as a writer. But he understood the difference between art and politics and resisted anyone dictating his agenda as a playwright.
“No writer must ever presume to tell another writer what his or her political responsibilities are,” he told the Paris Review. “It is a poet’s right in South Africa to write a poem that seemingly has no political resonance.”
At the same time, he recognized, in a talk he gave at Rhodes University in 1991, that it probably wasn’t possible to “tell a South African story accurately and truthfully and for it not to have a political spin-off.” Complacency for him was unthinkable when a majority of his fellow citizens were denied their fundamental liberties.
But Fugard, who though primarily known as a playwright was also an accomplished novelist, director and actor, understood the limits of propaganda. Only art, unflinchingly committed to the truth, has the potential to influence hearts and minds. He was determined to become, in all his work, a witness.
The contradictions inherent in his position as a white South African dissident became a source of dramatic conflict in his plays. Fugard couldn’t renounce his identity, but he could scrutinize it with ruthless honesty, subject it to imaginative tests and share his ethical findings.
For all the political freight of Fugard’s works, he was a deeply personal writer. It wasn’t so much ideas or arguments that inspired his plays but human beings in all their messy complications.
His notebooks, bursting with images and anecdotes of real-life folks whose stories caught his attention, provided a storehouse for his plays. Fugard wasn’t in a rush to translate this material to the stage. The figures in his journals would have to wait until something within him summoned them into theatrical action.
Before he could inhabit the psychology of his characters, his own psychology had to be stirred. As he explained in his speech at Rhodes University, “The Swedish poet [Tomas] Tranströmer has a line to the effect that when the external event coincides with the internal reality the poem happens. That is how it works for me as a playwright.”
Time and again it was the reality of what Fugard called “human desperation” that inflamed his imagination. “Nobody has ever written a good play about a group of happy people who started off happy and who were happy all the way through,” he elaborated. “And in South Africa if you have found a desperate individual, nine times out of 10 you have also found a desperate political situation.”
